[First published April 21, 2005] Academic freedom? The hallowed conflict of ideas? The sanctity of open debate? Ha! That’s not the American university anymore. Only one side now has the freedom to state its views, and the other sides beware.

What happened to Professor Thomas Klocek of DePaul University in Chicago is a case in point. Quoting from Joseph Farah’s recent article, “When ‘academic freedom’ fails,”

Last Sept. 15, the man who has taught critical thinking, college writing and cultures of the world at the Catholic university’s School for New Learning for the last 15 years, Klocek made the mistake of debating the subject of the Middle East with some extremists partial to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Arab nationalists among the Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Muslims Moving Ahead at a student activities fair.

The informal debate got heated, as Klocek was the sole defender of Israel and Middle East Christians in the room. But there were no blows exchanged. There were no verbal threats. And the spirited argument lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, according to everyone involved.

Nine days later, Klocek found himself the victim of an “emergency suspension” and unceremoniously kicked off the campus. No hearing by his peers. No formal complaints lodged against him. The unsubstantiated accusations by zealous students that Klocek made “racist” remarks was all that was needed to crush the claim of academic freedom at DePaul.

He was offered his job back if he agreed to monitored teaching and apologized to the students. He refused.

Now he finds himself with no job. . . .
You see, diversity is welcomed in academia as long as you don’t disagree with what passes for conventional wisdom in the rarefied atmosphere of academia. . . .Klocek was accused by the students of the unpardonable sins of “demeaning their ideas” and “dishonoring their perspective” and pressing erroneous assertions” and that he used his power as a “professor over them” to force them to accept his arguments as true.

What did he say? He questioned the accuracy of literature asserting Rachel Corrie was “murdered by an Israeli bulldozer” and a verbal assertion that “the Palestinians are being treated by Israelis the same way Hitler treated the Jews.”

This is not just one story. One could put together a book of sad tales of students and professors who have been punished by the left for their views or mistaken belief in “academic freedom.”

This is very serious, for the schools are now a major subversive force in our society undermining the idea of freedom. They get their hands on our children and youth and by their propaganda turn them into armies of “anti-war,” anti-globalization, anti-American, brain washed demonstrators and protestors. That is, before they eventually become teachers, businessmen, politicians, and, of course, lawyers and judges, all to further, often unknowingly, leftism.

What to do about it? Sunshine. Documentaries. Investigative journalism by blogs, talk radio, and the new media. Legislative hearings. And let the truth be exposed. The left’s anchor to the schools – tenure — could not survive arousing the silent majority.

Link of Note

Three political scientists did a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and asked them how they identified themselves politically. This article describes the results (full report not generally available):

. . . the ideological divide on campuses may be greater than has previously been thought. And the authors of this survey say that their evidence suggests say that conservatives, practicing Christians and women are less likely than others to get faculty jobs at top colleges. . . . humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent).

Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

As far as reported, the study does not assess the ideological spread among liberals (moderate democrat, liberal democrat, leftist, communist) as opposed to conservatives. In my experience, many self identified liberals are on the far left or are communists (Marxists), and the those who call themselves conservatives are often moderate or liberal Republicans. Its like dividing the world into democracies and nondemocracies without showing that many nondemocracies are totalitarian and bloody thug regimes like North Korea, while many of the democracies are barely electoral democracies, with repressed human rights as now in Russia.

That the contemporary American university is an anti-American, pro-socialist propaganda mill is suggested by the survey above, but the true meaning of this division has to be experienced to fear its dire implications for individual freedom, such as it was for Professor Klocek of DePaul University.

[First published October 12, 2005] I have taught for most of my life in a university and had tenure. But I oppose its system of tenure. It has become a system that protects incompetent faculty, and a shield behind which many faculty take their salary, teach their courses from yellowed notes, do little real research, and spend much of their time socializing, pursuing personal interests, a hobby, or promoting their politics. It is an unbelievable life compared to that of the working stiff or the businessman. Faculty may teach six to twenty hours a week, depending on whether they are at a research university (one that has a Ph.D. program in most disciplines), or not. Aside from his teaching hours, the tenured professor is free to come and go. For those at a research university, teaching only six to nine hours, he may be expected to also counsel students, chair Ph.D. dissertations, and participate in department and university committees. But, through various ruses, he may avoid much of this. And indeed, if their incompetence and stupidly is known — and there are seldom secrets about this — he may be relieved of these academic obligations. Thus the dumber and less competent, the more free time to idle away at maybe $50,000-60,000 a year (if there is a faculty union, raises are across the board).

Those who suffer from this system are the students and fresh PhDs, from whom positions are held by the aged and feeble. With tenure, a guaranteed salary, and associated perks, these hanger-ons will not retire even when their lecture notes disintegrate from age and use.

There is something more here. The tenure system has enabled a coalition of leftist-socialist-Marxists (communist) professors to establish a politburo-like rule over an academic department. They control who is hired; who does not get tenure; the criteria for accepting graduate students into the department, and awarding them teaching assistantships, and grants; and the content of the curriculum. Because of tenure, this control is virtually impossible to change except by the death or, exceptionally, retirement of its members. And this is a wide-ranging coalition across departments and universities. They give good reviews to each other’s books; as peer reviewers, they recommend the publication of each others articles; as panel chairmen, they select who will be on a professional panel and who the discussants will be; and as grant application readers, they determine who will get funds for research; and perhaps most important, they decide what dissertations will be accepted. In other words, these tenured leftists move whole disciplines, such that they become marked by a dominant leftist ideology. Such is sociology, political science, and the humanities today.

The left shields their tenure by claiming it guarantees academic freedom. Don’t believe it. Even the tenured who disagree with the dominant left, or step on one of their icons (e.g., American “imperialism,” “greedy” capitalism, the Palestinian “just cause”), can be fired, or the conditions of their academic life made so miserable that they will leave. For the left, academic freedom is for the leftist professor, not the libertarian, conservative, or heaven forbid, Bush supporter. What applies to faculty is multiplied for students. To get a good grade and, most important recommendation (the coin of the academic realm), mirror the prof. on exams (if he claims white is black, then so it is), ask softball questions, or shut up.

What to do about this system? Legislators in some states are trying to pass an academic bill of rights (see link below) By itself, it will do no good as long as there is tenure to protect incompetence, malingering, and extremism. Other than getting rid of tenure (I favor five-year renewable contracts), the best way to deal with this is sunshine — transparency of what goes on with tenured academics. If outraged non-leftist faculty and students speak out with their personal stories, if what is going on within the university with tenure is disclosed, then this pollution will eventually be known by boards of overseers and regents, and those who support and fund universities and their projects. And students and their parents may start avoiding certain schools.

And finally, the poor worker, dedicated professional, and hard working businessman may see how their taxes or the tuition they pay for their children is being used. Especially, they will eventually see how while they work hard for what they earn, there is a malingering, money-sucking class like an ancient aristocracy, living within their university-castle, and surrounded by a tenure-moat

Links of Note

Links I Must Share

Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowiz has a long track record of leftist political views and defense of human rights. After 9/11 he began to speak out openly on the need to confront militant Islamacism and terror tactics. So it’s not surprising that yesterday he took on Columbia Univ. and its faculty.

The recent firestorm of controversy over the Campus Watch website may be only the beginning. Now a new website called NoIndoctrination.org has the potential to draw wide public attention to the abuse of fairness and trust regularly practiced in today’s politically correct college classrooms.

[First published December 22, 2005] When North Vietnam took over the South in 1974, they introduced re-education camps. Their purpose was to brainwash those who had lived under capitalism and an anti-communist government. First, camp leaders daily drilled into prisoners’ minds the evil of greedy, exploitive capitalism and the selfishness and self-centeredness of freedom. This was followed by drilling, drilling, and more drilling into prisoners’ cleansed minds the glories of the people’s democracy, and its selflessness, compassion, and real freedom. The prisoners had two choices: accept this or else.

Well, you may not have realized it, but we have our own re-education camps in the United States. Young people are practically forced into the camps if they want to be professionals in some field or get a good job and income. Once in the camps, these youths are required to submit to re-education sessions (called classes) led by those well selected for this purpose. As they move towards getting a signed release from the camps in four or more years, they are successively brainwashed of the mental pollution instilled by parents, and their capitalist, racist, homophobic, bigoted Christian, right wing conservative environment. And year-by-year they are re-educated into the left’s view of the world — socialism, secularism, moral relativism, rabid environmentalism, fanatical feminism, anti-anti-communism, pro-homosexuality, and finally, but not least, fervent anti-Americanism.

Before they get their release from these camps, students must undergo constant testing to assure their session leaders that their minds have been washed, dried, and ironed with the approved mental creases and folds. The students have two choices: accept this or else.

Such is the higher education system in the U.S.

What, I exaggerate? Tell that to the young conservative Democrat, Republican, or libertarian who has gone through four years in almost any university or college to see how well this re-education analogy holds true.

No informed reader can deny that the University now runs to the left; that the left owns and controls it. Why is this? It is because universities are inverted pyramids of power, quite unlike organizations outside this enclave. It is the faculty that decide the essential questions — who will be hired and fired, what courses will be taught, what grades will be given students, and what their recommendations will be. Moreover, faculty decide what students will be awarded teaching and research assistantships, and higher degrees. So as the faculty moved left, so did the university.

And the reason for this is that once leftists gradually got control over university departments, such as sociology, political science, anthropology, English, and history, they always could find a reason not to hire someone not loyal to their cause: he or she is “politically insensitive,” their research is “incompetent,” their scholarship is “lacking,” they would not “fit into our program,” or they are “anti-diversity.” Moreover, students who try to keep an open mind are soon taught to keep their ideas and questions to themselves. Leftist teachers and advisors approve and shape their term papers, MA thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation. Anyway, few lowly students have the ego to disagree with a full professor who may be well known and often cited in his field.

What to do? Any attempt to work inside these re-education camps is doomed to failure. Since administrators are generally drawn from the faculty, and therefore are often as leftist as the faculty, the left organize and control these camps. They will bloc, weaken, delay, and redefine any attempt to reduce their power. It must be done from the outside, by boards of regents, legislatures, alumni, and grant givers. I suggest that a first step is to abolish tenure, which assures the left its positions and stability, and in its place have a five-year contract system, with renewal.

Secondly, I subscribe to the Academic bill of rights, and believe it should be legislated for those camps receiving state funds, and established as a governing charter by boards of regents for private camps.

Third, these bodies should also establish an outside appeal system for faculty and students who believe they have been subject to ideological bias.

Finally, if students and the few non-liberal-left faculty there are would expose what is going on in their departments and courses, legislatures and board of regents would be encouraged to act. It is the great ignorance of the public as to how their tax or tuition dollars are being spent that enables these re-education camps to exist as they are.

And how will the leftist faculty attack all this? They will scream that this is “a direct right wing attack on academic freedom.” Yes, freedom for the left to run their re-education camps. Can’t give the same freedom to those “stupid, ignorant, immoral, fascist, and just plain wrong,” conservatives, you know.

[First published February 28, 2005] In my 3/17/09 blog “On Ward Churchill and Academic Leftmania,” I described the state of American universities, particularly the social sciences, humanities, and special studies or programs (woman’s studies, ethnic studies, etc.). In effect, they constitute anti-American, socialist, and leftist propaganda factories. I will refer to them all as leftsville.

The academic leftists have one and really only one argument for legislatures, regents, and other outsiders to leave them alone to spew their propaganda, and that is academic freedom. That is, the leftists argue, academics should be free to say unpopular things, to teach what they believe, and to research the unconventional. It is a powerful argument, and we all are for it in these terms. Thus, we have tenure, whose prime purpose is to protect this freedom by making it almost impossible to fire a professor for his beliefs.

But in application, this academic freedom has been destroyed from within. Simply, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, devoted Christians, or the otherwise politically incorrect will not be hired; or by mischance if they are, they will not get tenure; or if they change their views after they get tenure, they will be not too gently encouraged to find other employment. Thus, we have academic departments with democrats/liberals/communists (called Marxists) outnumbering Republicans/libertarians/conservatives 30 or 40 to 1.

What this means is that students get only views on history, current events, and contentious issues, for within a narrow band of liberal-left-communist beliefs. They are not being educated, but propagandized. And what academic freedom has come to mean in practice is to protect leftsville from attempts to create a true diversity of beliefs, teaching, and research.

What to do?

First, is to inform. Universities depend on public funds, gifts and contributions, and tuition. The more legislators, the wealthy, and parents come to understand that they are paying for the country’s future leaders to be taught how good is the socialist-equalitarian model, including communism for some (you see, what happened in communist countries, with all the democide and other horrors, was “state capitalism,” not true Marxism), and how bad is the United States.

Second is to investigate. There should be outside (inside is almost hopeless) research into this Leftsville—what is being taught and how, the treatment of nonleftist students, favoritism toward leftist ones, and what happens to non-liberal and leftist faculty. Of course, leftsville will go to war against this and the drums of academic freedom will beat mercilessly on everyone’s ears. Stuff them with cotton, and investigate. I think the results will shock the public.

And third, discard tenure. It is the dirty bath water and not the baby. Tenure is precisely the reason leftsville has expanded to envelope the whole university. There are other reasons besides creating a diversity of beliefs to get rid of this protection of leftsville, and that is tenure also protects the deadwood and stupid among them. There is little opportunity for the young, mentally vigorous, and promising scholars to move into this world now made up so many old professors with their yellowing lecture notes, and two or three articles in some left wing magazine or journal.

In the place of tenure, I suggest a five-year contract, renewable every five years. The renewal should be based on a department’s recommendations, evaluation of peers at other universities, and student evaluations. And, I suggest that the university committee making the final decision has administration, faculty, student, and outside members (suggested by the regents or governing board).

This may seem impossible, given tenure’s grip on higher education and the mass of the naïve and innocents outside the universities that are taken in by the academic freedom battle flag. But, all universities have one vulnerability that can win this battle. Money. Hit their funding sources. Weigh in on federal and local tax money. Inform the wealthy of what their endowments are really supporting. Organize boycotts among parents against sending their children to the worse leftsvilles. Encourage business and federal agencies to hire graduating seniors from other universities, and so on. There are so many ways in a democracy like ours to persuade universities that perhaps it is time to rethink tenure, that all it really takes is information, communication, and will.

Link of Note

“. . . in a recent meeting with several hundred students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, I made the allegation that too many tenured professors proudly declare themselves “Communists” while pushing hard-left agendas on students. They’ve made it clear that conservative and Christian views are unwelcome in their classrooms.

“I said that students were being blackmailed into silence by professors who hold grade point averages over their heads as punishment for expressing conflicting ideologies.

“I also stated that our students are being brainwashed, while parents are being forced to pay large sums of money for the privilege of watching professors play with their children’s young minds.

“Two professors who had infiltrated the meeting rose in protest. Red-faced, they declared me to be a liar and demanded that I prove my ‘outrageous” allegations.’ A young lady in the front row of the packed auditorium bravely raised her hand.

“First timidly, then with increasing firmness, she spoke of several of her Lehigh professors who had expressed hatred for American values and fondness for the likes of Fidel Castro. Following her lead, other students rose to give similar testimony. The angry and now ‘outed’ professors quickly made their exit.”

[First published February 25, 2005] I have read Ward Churchill’s “’Some People Push Back’ On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” (link given below). It’s a propaganda piece, and could have been written by Bin Laden with hardly a change in wording.

Churchill has become a popular figure on campus and is often invited to give speeches and talks, and indeed, has even been invited by faculty to speak at the University of Hawaii, from which I retired years ago. In light of this, I want to say a few words about the leftist university climate in which an ignorant fraud, and expressed enemy of the United States like Churchill, can thrive. I’ll focus this on two hallowed academic principles. But first, a word about the leftism of the university.

The university is institutionally diverse, with schools and departments of law, medicine, business, engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, and so forth. Generally, the faculty in business, engineering, natural sciences, mathematics, agriculture, and related, are least on the left, although as I understand the latest polls or surveys, Democrats still dominate in them. However, it is the humanities, social sciences, and law, and such programs as ethnic studies, woman studies, peace studies, and such, that are most dominated by the left. So, when a survey claims that 85 percent of the faculty vote Democrat, and that covers all the way from engineering and the hard sciences to the humanities, then the figure for the humanities and social sciences alone has to be much higher. Indeed, judging from my experience, a conservative or Republican in these fields is extremely rare, say, one out of thirty, or forty faculty. There are more communists (they call themselves Marxists), than either libertarians or conservatives together, and It appears to me that those on the left outnumber the average liberal and moderate Democrat.

Now, as to the two hallowed principles. One is diversity. There is none in political orientation. The left has captured the university and fight to maintain their control. They refuse to hire or give tenure to those perceived conservative or nonsupportive of their ideology. It is done cleverly, you see, by pointing to problems in a candidate’s research or lectures. For example, if a candidates supported Bush’s foreign policy, they would find his research inadequate, insensitive to Iraq deaths, hawkish, nationalistic, and so forth.

This also extends to sending out invitations to speakers. Almost always, these speakers are liberal or left; hardly ever conservative or libertarian, unless certain conservative student groups fight like hell to bring one. And even then, hostile leftist students may so threaten disruption, that the university administration may use this as an excuse to cancel the engagement they didn’t want anyway.

The second hallowed principle, which you hear often in defense of Churchill, is academic freedom. After almost forty years of being in a university as a student and teaching, I have seen the campus go from the existence of a wide range of extensive academic freedom to a narrow band in the social sciences and humanities. I’m retired now, but if I were teaching, I know many things I believe related to my field that I could not say on campus or while teaching. What we have now is a leftist enforced control of speech such that every academic has academic freedom as long as they stick close to the liberal-leftist line.

To put this bluntly, academic freedom is now a charade, a leftiwocky, most often expressed by liberal and leftist faculty and ideological innocents to protect these faculty from outside criticism.

How do they enforce this? If a faculty member does not have tenure, he had better hue the liberal and leftist line if he wants it. If he has tenure, then at least through their control of the department chairmanship and major committees, they can make a conservative or libertarian professor suffer a thousand cuts: worst parking spaces, worst offices, no assistants, no promotions (if possible), no salary increases (if not automatic) or merit increases, heaviest teaching load, assigned largest and most elementary courses, many committee assignments (but never a chairmanship), no travel allowance, no research support, a campaign among leftist students to get others to avoid their classes, and plain old social isolation. It has to be an unusually dedicated faculty member to stick this out. And this is just at the department level. What a dean can do is far worse, such as using leftist student complaints to set up a Star Chamber investigation.

To be clear, I am not saying that liberal of leftist academics are more incompetent, more biased, less intelligent, less productive, or poorer teachers than conservatives or libertarians. I am not saying they all are bad people or academics in some sense. A lot of the good work in my area on international relations, foreign policy, and the democratic peace has come from these academics. I will say this, however. In general, they are less open minded, less tolerant of opposing ideas, less willing to engage them, and more self-righteous.

Something has to be done about the lack of diversity and freedom of speech on campus and, I’m afraid, we simply can’t wait until the passage of several generations of faculty moves universities more towards the center. What should this be? Well, that will take another blog or so.

Link of Note

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well. . . . it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.
Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America’s sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who’ve died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Comment by Colleague TwoColleague Two is a professor of international law.

The problem with Churchill is not merely that he’s a left-wing screwball, but that his whole life has been one big lie. He got a job as a professor pretending to be a “Native American” and that’s been proven false. He portrayed himself as a Vietnam war hero and turns out he was a Public Affairs specialist who changed reels on a movie projector.

[First published March 15, 2005] Recently, Philip Bennett, Managing Editor of The Washington Post, was interviewed by Yong Tang, People’s Daily Washington-based correspondent ( interview here). The biased leftism disclosed by Bennett is chilling and dangerous when one considers that we are at war, that he is speaking to the Chinese ruling thugs and people, and that China supports the terrorists and the other anti-democratic thugs of the world. So far, the media comments on the interview, including by conservatives, have not really caught much of what I find damning. So, I am quoting below the most revealing parts of the interview. I am not including the questions by Yong, unless necessary for understanding Bennett’s answer. I have tried to keep quotations in context so that they will not be misleading.

Bennett: The world image of US is so clearly linked to its foreign policy and particularly its policy toward Iraq and Middle East, say its support of HYPERLINK “http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/data/israel.html”Israel and its occupation of Iraq. . . . Another source of the resentment is the perception that Bush administration wants to act unilaterally in the world, outside of alliance that traditionally governed the ways Bush made foreign policy decisions.

RJR: A perception for which Bennett’s management of the news is partly responsible.

Bennett: The Bush administration believes that there isn’t a contradiction between defending its self-interest and promoting friendly and democratic regimes. Because they believe that promoting those kinds of governments would make the world more friendly to the US and therefore it is in the interest of America to do that.

RJR: He just does not understand the Bush foreign policy. True, democracies will be friendlier to the U.S., but the basic drive of the policy is that it will promote peace and an end to terrorism.

Yong Tang: Since the standard is not applied equally in the world, it is damaging Bush’s effort to promote the so-called democracy, isn’t it?

Bennett: If you look around the world in strategically important places, is the US actively engaged there promoting democracy or not? I don’t think there is much evidence that promoting democracy is what the US is doing. It is what it says it is doing.

RJR: My God, how can he not see what Bush has done in, or regarding, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, Egypt, and Indonesia?

Bennett: No, I don’t think US should be the leader of the world. . . . I also think it is unhealthy to have one country as the leader of the world. That is also a sort of colonial question. The world has gone through colonialism and imperialism. We have seen the danger and shortcomings of those systems. If we are heading into another period of imperialism where the US thinks itself as the leader of the area and its interest should prevail over all other interests of its neighbors and others, then I think the world will be in an unhappy period.

RJR: He simply does not understand that if the U.S. does not lead, some other country or countries will, such as France and Germany, or even China as her power grows. He also shares the view of many on the left about U.S, imperialism.

Yong Tang: So the world order should be democratic?

Bennett: Democracy means many things. How do you define democracy? As a Chinese journalist, you may have your own definition of democracy which corresponds to your history and your way of seeing the world. I may have another definition. Someone else may have their own definitions. Democracy means a lot of different things. . . . So democracy is not a cure that could turn everything bad into good. It has its own advantages and its disadvantages.

RJR: There you have it. Hardly an encouragement to democratic forces in China

Bennett: We have a little bit different roles in newspapers compared with our counterparts in Europe and other countries. We don’t have any political point of view that we are trying to advance. We don’t represent any political parties. We are not tied to any political movement. On the news side of the paper we try not to give opinions.

RJR: Typical we-just-report-the-news view of the liberals and leftists who run the major American media.

Bennett: One of the jobs of our correspondents in Baghdad is to tell our readers what the Bush administration is trying to hide. Bush says democracy is advancing in Iraq, but our correspondents say the situation there is much more complex than that. Our job is to put that in the public domain and challenge the government and hold them accountable.

The government of the US is becoming much more secretive, much more hostile to the press in terms of giving us access to the information. So a lot of what we do here is to fight for access to the information that we think the public should have. . . .It is true that in the areas of national security many more things are becoming secrets since after 9/11. So it is a big thing for The Washington Post to be the first major newspaper in America to publish the pictures about the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoners abuse scandal. . . . So our reporters are trained, encouraged and supported in going out and finding things that the government is trying to hide from the public. That is a lot of what we do.

RJR: So, he wants to, in effect and blindly, act as the intelligence service for the enemy.

Bennett: Where the news gathering part of the Post failed was to be sufficiently skeptical about the administration’s claims that there are weapons of mass destructions in Iraq. . . . For me, this episode is a good example of how difficult it is to independently verify the government’s claims when the government is lying to you. . . .

RJR: This is one of the most prevalent and enduring mantras among the left. I’ve heard and read virtually all of Bush’s speeches on foreign policy, and he did not lie. He said what he believed, based on intelligence reports to him from not only the CIA, but the intelligence services of other democracies. Moreover, we are now finding out that indeed there was WMD in Iraq that Hussein had removed just before our invasion.

Bennett: Neither The Washington Post, nor The New York Times, nor any other big newspapers, refer to China today as a dictatorship regime. We don’t use these words on the paper any more. Now we say China is a communist country only because it is a fact. China is ruled by the Communist party. . . . On the contrary, we are trying to understand the complexity of China. . . . There are many things happening now in China. Sometimes it is extraordinarily contradictory because it is a big country and it is a country which includes many things happening at the same time.

RJR: Freedom house rates China among the worst in political rights and just below worst in civil liberties for 2004. Its thugs judicially execute more of its subjects than any other regime (from which still warm bodies they harvest the organs for top officials or for sale); return to Kim Jong Il’s hands thousands of poor North Koreans who have escaped from his border to border prison, many to be executed; beat, torture, and kill those who just want to exercise their religion; and allow no freedom of political speech. Moreover, they rule by conquest Tibet, Sinkiang (sovereign and independent as The Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkistan until invaded by communist forces in 1950), and all of Manchuria, never fully part of China until taken over by the communists.

Bennett: When I went to China, I felt I was seeing into the future. I think it is a deeply fascinating country. Every time when I go there, I see and learn things that I never expect to see and learn. It is a country with such beauty and potential. I also think how China resolve the challenges it face today will be a major force to decide the future of the planet . . .

I was very impressed by the degree of preparation, engagement, knowledge and vision that they [ruling thugs] have of China and China’s role in the world. There is no more complex job in the world in trying to run and administer a country so big with so many different issues, with people living in good wealth and poverty as well. The job is much more difficult than being an American President though they are different jobs in some ways.

RJR: Yes, you know, not much difference between a communist thug whose rule depends on his henchmen’s guns, and a democratically elected president, whose leadership depends on the support of the people. They are just “different jobs in different ways.” Deep sigh.

Link of Note

BEIJING, March 14 — China enacted a law Monday authorizing the use of force against Taiwan if it moves toward formal independence, codifying its long-standing threat to attack the island. The measure could provoke a popular backlash in Taiwan and quickly unravel recent progress in cross-strait relations.

The National People’s Congress, the ruling Communist Party’s rubber-stamp parliament, approved the anti-secession law by a vote of 2,896 to 0, with two abstentions, defying U.S. appeals for restraint and strong protests by Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian as well as some of his political rivals.

It is interesting to follow up the Post’s Managing Editor’s interview above with the papers’ treatment of the latest move by China’s ruling Hu Jintao. Pan does mention that the “law” was passed by the China’s rubber-stamp parliament (which some media do not mention), but the rest of the article’s tone gives more meaning to the “law” than it deserves. This is not a law in a democratic sense. It is not something passed by an elected legislature that governs the people and government. It is, pure and simple, a tool for misleading its own subjects and the world, and to lay down a marker to the United States and Taiwan. No law as we understand it governs China. In place of law are only communist party dictates that its thugs can violate or change as they will.